The US, F ups, and the CIA

Charles Nesbitt Wilson (born June 1, 1933), is a former United States naval officer and former 12-term Democratic United States Representative from the 2nd congressional district in Texas.

He is best known for leading Congress into supporting Operation Cyclone, the largest-ever CIA covert operation, which supplied the Afghan Mujahideen during the Soviet war in Afghanistan. His behind-the-scenes campaign was the subject of the non-fiction book Charlie Wilson's War and a subsequent film adaptation.

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Pakistans ISI helping Taliban in Afghanistan
June 10th, 2008 - 7:23 pm ICT by ANI

Washington, June 10 (ANI): A leading US think-tank has said that Pakistans Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and Frontier Corps have failed to root out Afghan insurgents based in Pakistan and some individuals from these organizations have provided direct assistance to groups like the Taliban and Haqqani network.

If Taliban sanctuary bases in Pakistan are not eliminated, the US and its NATO allies will face crippling long-term consequences in their effort to stabilize and rebuild Afghanistan, according to a RAND Corporation study.

The study, funded by the U.S. Department of Defence, finds that every successful insurgency in Afghanistan since 1979 enjoyed safe haven in neighbouring countries, and the current insurgency is no different, said the report.

Right now, the Taliban and other groups are getting help from individuals within Pakistan’s government, and until that ends, the region’s long-term security is in jeopardy, it added.

The study, Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, is the latest in a series examining insurgency and counterinsurgency, and details how the US should improve its capabilities for future conflicts.

The report says that in addition to the Taliban, other insurgency groups finding refuge in Pakistan include the Haqqani network, Gulbuddin Hekmatyars radical Islamic Hezb-i-Islami organization, al Qaeda and a number of local tribes and sub-tribes.

The study finds that these insurgent groups find refuge in Pakistans Federally Administered Tribal Areas, North West Frontier Province, and Balochistan Province.

They regularly ship weapons, ammunitions and supplies into Afghanistan from Pakistan, and a number of suicide bombers have come from Afghan refugee camps based in Pakistan. (ANI)

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6-09-03
The Largest Covert Operation in CIA History
By Chalmers Johnson

Mr. Johnson is the author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic, to be published in January by Metropolitan Books.

The Central Intelligence Agency has an almost unblemished record of screwing up every "secret" armed intervention it ever undertook. From the overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953 through the Bay of Pigs, the failed attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro of Cuba and Patrice Lumumba of the Republic of Congo, the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, the "secret war" in Laos, aid to the Greek colonels who seized power in 1967, the 1973 killing of Salvador Allende in Chile and Ronald Reagan's Iran-contra war against Nicaragua, there is not a single instance in which the agency's activities did not prove acutely embarrassing to the United States. The CIA continues to get away with this primarily because its budget and operations have always been secret and Congress is normally too indifferent to its constitutional functions to rein in a rogue bureaucracy. Therefore the tale of a purported CIA success story should be of some interest.

According to the author of the newly released Charlie Wilson's War, the exception to CIA incompetence was the arming between 1979 and 1988 of thousands of Afghan moujahedeen ("freedom fighters"). The agency flooded Afghanistan with an astonishing array of extremely dangerous weapons and "unapologetically mov[ed] to equip and train cadres of high tech holy warriors in the art of waging a war of urban terror against a modern superpower," in this case, the USSR.

The author of this glowing account, George Crile, is a veteran producer for the CBS television news show "60 Minutes" and an exuberant Tom Clancy-type enthusiast for the Afghan caper. He argues that the U.S. clandestine involvement in Afghanistan was "the largest and most successful CIA operation in history" and "the one morally unambiguous crusade of our time." He adds that "there was nothing so romantic and exciting as this war against the Evil Empire." Crile's sole measure of success is the number of Soviet soldiers killed (about 15,000), which undermined Soviet morale and contributed to the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the period from 1989 to 1991. That's the successful part.

However, he never mentions that the "tens of thousands of fanatical Muslim fundamentalists" the CIA armed are some of the same people who in 1996 killed 19 American airmen at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia; bombed our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998; blew a hole in the side of the U.S. destroyer Cole in Aden harbor in 2000; and on Sept. 11, 2001, flew hijacked airliners into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Today, the world awaits what is almost certain to happen soon at some airport -- a terrorist firing a U.S. Stinger low-level surface-to-air missile (manufactured at one time by General Dynamics in Rancho Cucamonga) into an American jumbo jet. The CIA supplied thousands of them to the moujahedeen and trained them to be experts in their use. If the CIA's activities in Afghanistan are a "success story," then Enron should be considered a model of corporate behavior.

Nonetheless, Crile's account is important, if appalling, precisely because it details how a ruthless ignoramus congressman and a high-ranking CIA thug managed to hijack American foreign policy. From 1973 to 1996, Charlie Wilson represented the 2nd District of Texas in the U.S. House of Representatives. His constituency was in the heart of the East Texas Bible Belt and was the long-held fiefdom of his fellow Democrat, Martin Dies, the first chairman of the House Un-American Affairs Committee. Wilson is 6 feet, 4 inches tall and "handsome, with one of those classic outdoor faces that tobacco companies bet millions on." He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1956, eighth from the bottom of his class and with more demerits than any other cadet in Annapolis history.

After serving in the Texas Legislature, he arrived in Washington in 1973 and quickly became known as "Good Time Charlie," "the biggest playboy in Congress." He hired only good-looking women for his staff and escorted "a parade of beauty queens to White House parties." Even Crile, who featured Wilson many times on "60 Minutes" and obviously admires him, describes him as "a seemingly corrupt, cocaine snorting, scandal prone womanizer who the CIA was convinced could only get the Agency into terrible trouble if it permitted him to become involved in any way in its operations."

Wilson's partner in getting the CIA to arm the moujahedeen was Gust Avrakotos, the son of working-class Greek immigrants from the steel workers' town of Aliquippa, Pa. Only in 1960 did the CIA begin to recruit officers for the Directorate of Operations from among what it called "new Americans," meaning such ethnic groups as Chinese, Japanese, Latinos and Greek Americans. Until then, it had followed its British model and taken only Ivy League sons of the Eastern Establishment. Avrakotos joined the CIA in 1961 and came to nurture a hatred of the bluebloods, or "cake eaters," as he called them, who discriminated against him. After "spook school" at Camp Peary, next door to Jamestown, Va., he was posted to Athens, where, as a Greek speaker, he remained until 1978.

During Avrakotos's time in Greece, the CIA was instrumental in destroying Greek freedom and helping to turn the country into probably the single most anti-American democracy on Earth today. Incredibly, Crile describes this as follows: "On April 21, 1967, he [Avrakotos] got one of those breaks that can make a career. A military junta seized power in Athens that day and suspended democratic and constitutional government." Avrakotos became the CIA's chief liaison with the Greek colonels. After the fall of the colonels' brutally fascist regime, the 17 November terrorist organization assassinated the CIA's Athens station chief, Richard Welch, on Dec. 23, 1975, and "Gust came to be vilified in the Greek radical press as the sinister force responsible for most of the country's many ills." He left the country in 1978 but could not get another decent assignment -- he tried for Helsinki -- because the head of the European Division regarded him as simply too uncouth to send to any of its capitals. He sat around Langley for several years without work until he was recruited by John McGaffin, head of the Afghan program. "If it's really true that you have nothing to do," McGaffin said, "why not come upstairs? We're killing Russians."

Wilson was the moneybags and sparkplug of this pair; Avrakotos was a street fighter who relished giving Kalashnikovs and Stingers to the tribesmen in Afghanistan. Wilson was the more complex of the two, and Crile argues that his "Good Time Charlie" image was actually a cover for a Barry Goldwater kind of hyper-patriotism. But Wilson was also a liberal on the proposed Equal Rights Amendment and a close friend of the late Congresswoman Barbara Jordan (D-Texas), and his sister Sharon became chairwoman of the board of Planned Parenthood.

As a boy, Wilson was fascinated by World War II and developed an almost childlike belief that he possessed a "special destiny" to "kill bad guys" and help underdogs prevail over their enemies. When he entered Congress, just at the time of the Yom Kippur War, he became a passionate supporter of Israel. After he traveled to Israel, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee began to steer large amounts of money from all over the country to him and to cultivate him as "one of Israel's most important Congressional champions: a non-Jew with no Jewish constituents." Jewish members of Congress also rallied to put Wilson on the all-powerful Appropriations Committee in order to guarantee Israel's annual $3-billion subsidy. His own Texas delegation opposed his appointment.

Wilson was not discriminating in his largess. He also became a supporter of Anastasio "Tacho" Somoza, the West Point graduate and dictator of Nicaragua who in 1979 was swept away by popular fury. Before that happened, President Carter tried to cut the $3.1-million annual U.S. aid package to Nicaragua, but Wilson, declaring Somoza to be "America's oldest anti-Communist ally in Central America," opposed the president and prevailed.

During Wilson's long tenure on the House Appropriations Committee, one of its subcommittee chairmen, Clarence D. "Doc" Long, used to have a sign mounted over his desk: "Them that has the gold makes the rules." Wilson advanced rapidly on this most powerful of congressional committees. He was first appointed to the foreign operations subcommittee, which doles out foreign aid. He then did a big favor for then-Speaker Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill Jr. (D-Mass.). The chairman of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee at the time, Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), had been caught in the FBI's ABSCAM sting operation in which an agent disguised as a Saudi sheik offered members of Congress large cash bribes. O'Neill put Wilson on the Ethics Committee to save Murtha, which he did. In return, O'Neill assigned Wilson to the defense appropriations subcommittee and made him a life member of the governing board of the John F. Kennedy Performing Arts Center, where he delighted in taking his young dates. Wilson soon discovered that all of the CIA's budget and 40 percent of the Pentagon's budget is "black," hidden from the public and even from Congress. As a member of the defense subcommittee, he could arrange to have virtually any amount of money added to whatever black project he supported. So long as Wilson did favors for other members on the subcommittee, such as supporting defense projects in their districts, they would never object to his private obsessions.

About this time, Wilson came under the influence of a remarkable, rabidly conservative Houston woman in her mid-40s, Joanne Herring. They later fell in love, although they never married. She had a reputation among the rich of the River Oaks section of Houston as a collector of powerful men, a social lioness and hostess to her fellow members of the John Birch Society. She counted among her friends Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, dictator and first lady of the Philippines, and Yaqub Khan, Pakistan's ambassador to Washington, D.C., who got Herring named as Pakistan's honorary consul for Houston.

In July 1977, the head of Pakistan's army, Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, seized power and declared martial law, and in 1979, he hanged Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the president who had promoted him. In retaliation, Carter cut off U.S. aid to Pakistan. In 1980, Herring went to Islamabad and was so entranced by Zia and his support for the Afghan freedom fighters that on her return to the United States, she encouraged Wilson to go to Pakistan. There he met Zia, learned about the Afghan moujahedeen and became a convert to the cause. Once Reagan replaced Carter, Wilson was able to restore Zia's aid money and added several millions to the CIA's funds for secretly arming the Afghan guerrillas, each dollar of which the Saudi government secretly matched.

Although Wilson romanticized the mountain warriors of Afghanistan, the struggle was never as uneven as it seemed. Pakistan provided the fighters with sanctuary, training and arms and even sent its own officers into Afghanistan as advisors on military operations. Saudi Arabia served as the fighters' banker, providing hundred of millions with no strings attached. Several governments, including those of Egypt, China and Israel, secretly supplied arms. And the insurgency enjoyed the backing of the United States through the CIA.

Wilson's and the CIA's greatest preoccupation was supplying the Afghans with something effective against the Soviets' most feared weapon, the Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunship. The Red Army used it to slaughter innumerable moujahedeen as well as to shoot up Afghan villages. Wilson favored the Oerlikon antiaircraft gun made in Switzerland (it was later charged that he was on the take from the Zurich-based arms manufacturer). Avrakotos opposed it because it was too heavy for guerrillas to move easily, but he could not openly stand in Wilson's way. After months of controversy, the Joint Chiefs of Staff finally dropped their objections to supplying the American Stinger, President Reagan signed off on it, and the "silver bullet" was on its way. The Stinger had never before been used in combat. It proved to be murderous against the Hinds, and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev decided to cut his losses and get out altogether. In Wilson's postwar tour of Afghanistan, moujahedeen fighters surrounded him and triumphantly fired their missiles for his benefit. They also gave him as a souvenir the stock from the first Stinger to shoot down a Hind gunship.

The CIA "bluebloods" fired Avrakotos in the summer of 1986, and he retired to Rome. Wilson became chairman of the Intelligence Oversight Committee, at which time he wrote to his CIA friends, "Well, gentlemen, the fox is in the hen house. Do whatever you like." After retiring from Congress in 1996, he became a lobbyist for Pakistan under a contract that paid him $30,000 a month. Meanwhile, the United States lost interest in Afghanistan, which descended into a civil war that the Taliban ultimately won. In the autumn of 2001, the United States returned in force after Al Qaeda retaliated against its former weapon supplier by attacking New York and Washington. The president of the United States went around asking, "Why do they hate us?"

Crile knows a lot about these matters and presents them in a dramatic manner. There are, however, one or two items that he appears unaware of or is suppressing. For the CIA legally to carry out a covert action, the president must authorize a document called a finding. Crile repeatedly says that Carter signed such a finding ordering the CIA to provide covert backing to the moujahedeen after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on Dec. 24, 1979. The truth of the matter is that Carter signed the finding on July 3, 1979, six months before the Soviet invasion, and he did so on the advice of his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in order to try to provoke a Russian incursion. Brzezinski has confirmed this sequence of events in an interview with a French newspaper, and former CIA Director Robert M. Gates says so explicitly in his 1996 memoirs. It may surprise Charlie Wilson to learn that his heroic moujahedeen were manipulated by Washington like so much cannon fodder in order to give the USSR its own Vietnam. The moujahedeen did the job, but as subsequent events have made clear, they may not be grateful to the United States.

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May 25, 2003
'Charlie Wilson's War': Arming the Mujahedeen

By DAVID JOHNSTON

For most of his 24-year career in the House of Representatives, Charles Wilson was known for his abiding fondness for hot tubs, women and Scotch whiskey. His friends at the Central Intelligence Agency said, only partly in jest, that the Texas Democrat's reputation as a roue provided a perfect cover for his great passion, the mujahedeen rebellion against the Soviet Union's occupation of Afghanistan. During the 1980's, Wilson used his seat on a military appropriations subcommittee to steer billions of dollars in secret funding to the C.I.A. to funnel arms to the mujahedeen.

So it was hardly a surprise after the Soviets' humiliating withdrawal in 1989 that the C.I.A.'s spymasters invited Wilson out to celebrate at the agency's headquarters at Langley, Va. On a large movie screen in an auditorium at the George Bush Center for Intelligence flashed a huge quotation from Pakistan's president, Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, who had willingly allowed the C.I.A.'s arms pipeline to flow through his country. Zia credited Wilson with the defeat of the Russians in Afghanistan with the words, ''Charlie did it.''

In ''Charlie Wilson's War,'' George Crile, a veteran ''60 Minutes'' producer, recounts the story of Wilson's personal journey from the East Texas Bible Belt to Congress, where he became the secret patron of what was then the largest covert operation in C.I.A. history. Of course, the American effort to arm the mujahedeen must be measured against recent events like the Sept. 11 attacks. The Qaeda hijackings underscored how the American-financed war against the Soviets in Afghanistan helped create a political vacuum filled by the Taliban and Islamic extremists, who turned their deadly terrorism back against the United States.

Moreover, there was concern within intelligence circles about the hundreds of Stinger missile systems that the C.I.A. supplied to the mujahedeen forces in the 1980's to combat the Russians' most fearful weapon, the Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunship. After the Soviet withdrawal, the agency embarked on a costly buyback program, but most of the missiles remained unaccounted for. American military commanders feared they might be used during the war in Afghanistan that followed the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

But in its time there was little dispute that the covert war was one of the most successful C.I.A. operations ever undertaken, a deadly confrontation conducted through a surrogate with the Soviet empire in its death throes. Only a handful of people in the government knew that behind the Afghan resistance was a pirate's crew of misfits, most notably Charlie Wilson himself, whom Crile affectionately profiles as the lawmaker who widened the war through a series of backroom deals on Capitol Hill that were never publicly disclosed or debated.

For most of his years in the House until he retired in 1996, Wilson rarely spoke on the House floor and was never associated with any of the great legislative issues of his day. He infuriated colleagues like Pat Schroeder, a Colorado Democrat, by calling her ''Babycakes,'' and acknowledged when he announced his retirement that ''at times I've been a reckless and rowdy public servant.'' But Crile asserts that Wilson's flaky public persona concealed a fervent anti-Communist and deeply ambitious politician, who built a power base in Congress that he used to pour money into the Afghan cause. In return for voting for military contracts in his colleagues' districts, Wilson won votes from his fellow lawmakers for the mujahedeen.

From a few million dollars in the early 1980's, support for the resistance grew to about $750 million a year by the end of the decade. The decisions were made in secret by Wilson and other lawmakers on the appropriations committee. To help make his case, Wilson exploited one of the decade's scandals, the Iran-contra affair, arguing that Democrats who were voting to cut off funding for the contras in Nicaragua could demonstrate their willingness to stand up to the Soviet empire by approving more money for the Afghan fighters.

''Charlie Wilson's War'' is a behind-the-scenes chronicle of a program that is still largely classified. Crile does not provide much insight into his reporting methods, but the book appears to be based on interviews with a number of the principals. The result is a vivid narrative, though a reader may wonder how much of this story is true in exactly the way Crile presents it. Still, few people who remember Wilson's years in Washington would discount even the wildest tales.

Crile recounts with relish Wilson's partying. There are many anecdotes of his overseas travels, first-class at taxpayers' expense, accompanied by former beauty queens who seem to pop up at events in conservative Islamic countries wearing skintight jumpsuits. In one odd moment, according to Crile, Wilson brought his own belly dancer from Texas to Cairo to entertain the Egyptian defense minister, who was secretly supplying the mujahedeen with millions of rounds of ammunition for the AK-47's that the C.I.A. was smuggling into Afghanistan. Her sultry dancing went far beyond the prudish norms of Cairo, but delighted the powerful minister.

Crile tells us that Wilson enjoyed driving to distraction a succession of C.I.A. officials as he prodded the agency to supply the fighters with increasingly more lethal weapons. The agency bureaucrats were content with a modest program designed to bleed the Soviets, whereas Wilson envisioned a war that the mujahedeen could win. As the money for the war began to flow, the C.I.A. put one of its own misfits in charge of the operation, Gust Avrakotos. He formed a small band of agency officers who quickly got behind the war in Afghanistan. Tens of thousands of automatic weapons, antitank guns, even satellite intelligence maps, redrawn in the form of crude maps that might have been penned by the mujahedeen themselves -- all of it was carried across Pakistan's border into Afghanistan on the backs of mules procured by the C.I.A. from as far away as the Tennessee hill country.

On Feb. 15, 1989, Gen. Boris Gromov, commander of the Soviets' 40th Army, walked across Friendship Bridge as the last Russian to leave Afghanistan. The C.I.A. cable from the Islamabad station to Langley said, ''We won.'' Wilson's own note to Avrakotos said simply, ''We did it.''


David Johnston, a senior Washington correspondent for The Times, covers terrorism and national security issues.


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company |

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